It is an unnerving feeling to be reading a work of fiction and have a sense of déjà vu. It's especially unsettling when author Omar El Akkad's dystopian vision in American War portrays this future U.S. through, as he has said in interviews, "a deliberately grotesque lens." El Akkad's stunning debut novel takes place from 2074 and 2095, during a second American Civil War between the North and South, at a time when rising sea levels caused by global warming have ravaged the Eastern seaboard (say goodbye to Florida; Augusta, Georgia, has become a port town), where a fictional North African empire rules the world and a manufactured plague has killed millions. The novel is a work of his imagination, of course, but it's so clearly informed by his years as a journalist that some of the characters he describes, or the scenes he created, felt like people I'd met, places where I've been.

Like Omar El Akkad, I've covered the so-called "war on terror" since the 9/11 attacks. We reported at the same time on the 2006 "Toronto 18" terror case; shared a desk when writing from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and covered the Arab Spring – El Akkad in Egypt, while I was in Yemen for the Toronto Star. Camp Patience is the name he gave a sprawling southern refugee camp in his novel. Camp Justice is the war crimes tent city at Gitmo. There were scenes that read as if plucked from the pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the use of waterboarding and other torture that occurred at the CIA's so-called black sites, where terrorism suspects were sent to disappear for years.

It was the complexity of his main character, Sarat Chestnut, which resonated with me the most. Readers are wrenched in all directions. At times we empathize with her and then chapters later, we can't — as she oscillates between protagonist and antagonist, and in the end is really neither. Her nephew, the book's narrator, explains that Sarat's "calculus" was simple: "The enemy had violated her people, and for that she would violate the enemy. There could be no other way, she knew it. Blood can never be unspilled." Perhaps that's where she ended up, but that's not what the book is about. It's about how she got there, and the many hands and injustices that pushed her along. And that's why the book is so brilliant and so uncomfortable. By creating this imaginary time and place, El Akkad strips readers of their biases and baggage to deliver a higher truth: that the corrosive nature of the "us versus them" narrative drives people to extremes. It is by becoming a novelist that El Akkad-the-journalist has written perhaps his most powerful report on the "war on terror" yet.